I am seated in my house in Nairobi looking at this painting of a rustic bicycle on the wall to my left. This painting looked so huge when I bought it from one of my friends last year, but it now seems to diminish in size every-other-day – just like the money in my pocket. Maybe that’s because the Ruto regime is at it again. Less than a year after the June 2024 protests, the broad-based government is again planning on raising taxes on essential commodities by introducing another anti-people Finance Bill before the Kenyan Parliament. Maybe that’s why everything – paintings, freedoms, disposable incomes – seem smaller.
The proposed 2025 Finance Bill literally diminishes earnings and disposable income for most Kenyans. It proposes to raise income tax to 37.7%, and scraps VAT exemptions on select essential products – products that were exempted to give some sort of relief to the lowest paid workers in society. The bill also proposes to increase the fuel levy, a move whose implication will be a Ksh. 10 increase in every liter of fuel purchased.
Then comes the madness. The 2025 Finance Bill proposes a neonatal tax, which is a tax on newborn babies. This neonatal tax means that families will essentially be taxed for every baby they have and care for. This particular tax makes no sense – and only adds to the financial obligations of families that are already struggling whilst receiving no services such as daycare assistance in return.
The 2025 Finance Bill also proposes a 1% levy on mobile money transfers, a 15% tax on internet costs, among many other regressive tax measures. This bill can therefore only be described as a death sentence to poor households – all those unseen and unheard by unjust power.
History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce.
This statement by Karl Marx might as well have been made with reference to the Ruto regime, for it is today more than clear that this regime has refused to learn from history. It is more than clear that this regime is intent on pushing forward with economic policies that hurt the poor.
When Kenyans took to the streets in 2024, it was against a similar finance bill that increased taxes on a citizenry that was already overtaxed. The masses were enraged by the fact that the Ruto regime, which rode to power on the back of a working-class narrative, had literally betrayed them whilst giving tax breaks to the rich, for instance, through tax exemptions on helichopter spare parts. They were also livid because their parliamentarians, who are among the highest-paid in the world, and who live opulent lifestyles in a highly unequal society, had turned a deaf ear to their objection to tax increases. The people were furious and resentful of all the people and institutions that had enabled this act of economic terrorism against them.
In June 2024, these patriotic Kenyans rose up to protest against the Finance Bill – but were instead met with teargas, water cannons, batons and bullets. When the protests finally simmered down, at least 60 lives had been lost to the conveyor belts of violence – the Kenya Police. These were young Kenyans, many of them with promising futures, killed for demanding their dignity.
Realising that their collective class interests were threatened, Kenya’s political elite coalesced together at about the same time. William Ruto’s UDA party impeached former Deputy President, Rigathi Gachagua, and closed ranks with Raila Odinga’s ODM, the largest opposition party, to form a broad-based government. For betraying the protest movement and saving Ruto’s sinking ship, ODM leaders were rewarded with plum cabinet positions – including finance, energy, mining – amongst a myriad of other economic gains. Gachagua, he of the infamous ‘shareholder’ statement, has spent these past months trying to rehabilitate his tattered political image – though he still rubs-off as a crude ethnic bigot.
Looking back at the political gymnastics that have marked the history of this country, it is correct to state that today’s Kenya does not have political leaders but ethnic warlords who use the people as bargaining chips in their intra-class battles.
In 2025, the political and bureaucratic bourgeoisie in this country, who largely produce nothing apart from hate, poverty, misery and death for the majority of Kenyans, are back at it again. Not having learnt from the 2024 protests when the masses said enough is enough, this small group of people has again decided to craft what is literally the most anti-people finance bill in the history of Kenya. The proposed taxes are anti-poor – and will only serve to consign poor people into even deeper levels of poverty. More fundamentally, these taxes will increase the percentage of Kenyans living below the poverty line.
The Finance Bill proposes to levy Value Added Tax(VAT) on all products. Under this tax regime, geothermal, solar and wind equipment will be slapped with VAT, while green buses will lose their VAT exemption – effectively slowing down the transition into green energy that is more friendly to our environment. The bill further proposes VAT on farm inputs, transportation of sugarcane, among others. The bureaucrats and politicians know that taxing farm inputs raises the cost of production for farmers – a cost that is most likely to be passed on to consumers who are already overburdened by high taxes.
The proposed 5% agriculture tax on tea, coffee and avocado sales, meanwhile, will eat into the earnings of small-holder farmers who are themselves already burdened by the new taxes on farm inputs – further reducing disposable income at household level. This particular tax should have been crafted in such a way so as to exempt small-holder farmers, whilst focussing on the many big farmers and multinationals that engage in various forms of tax avoidance.
In 2024, the youth(15-34) unemployment rate in Kenya stood at 67%. Majority of young Kenyans who are unable to secure employment locally have, over the years, been migrating to other countries in search of work. They toil day and night in these far-away lands – and some of them face abuse at the workplace. Most of them send remittances back home to support their families or to start personal projects. Having failed to provide this youth demographic with employment opportunities, the Kenyan government now plans to tax the money they send to their families by introducing a diaspora remittance levy.
Those able to secure work in Kenya are not spared either. Under the proposed bill, the lowest income earners will be taxed 25% of their salaries, while those in the highest income band will part with 37.7% of their income. Mandatory contributions such as the housing levy will eat a further 1.5% of their income, while the social security fund and the largely-inefficient public health insurance scheme also bite deeper into their earnings. A proposed 30% Fringe Benefit Tax on non-cash benefits such as employer-provided housing, vehicles, and loans will additionally result in higher tax burdens for some employees. Under this new dispensation, it is possible that some Kenyans will be paying as much as half (50%) of their earnings as taxes, with no guarantee of adequate and accessible social services from the state in return.
The bill further proposes an internet access levy of 15%. This levy will raise the internet costs, pushing it beyond the reach of many young Kenyans who use it for communication, education, among other things. When viewed in conjunction with other laws targeting the communications sector, it is clear that the regime is hell-bent on restricting the numbers of Kenyans who are able to freely access the internet.
Are you still able to recall the newborn tax (neonatal tax) that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay? Yes, you might soon be taxed for making babies, or rather, giving birth and caring for your children.
I have highlighted these few taxes (above) to make it clear that poverty does not fall from the sky, it is manufactured. The continuation of colonial patterns of economics that only extract and extract some more from the people and planet, without giving anything in return, is by design. It is an economic architecture designed to exploit the majority so as to safeguard the wealth of the few – the 1% – and their corporations.
Who will bell the cat?
Kenyans are grappling with cuts in public services, especially in the healthcare sector. They are increasingly forced to dig deeper into their already-overtaxed pockets so as to secure essential rights such as education, housing and healthcare which are guaranteed under the constitution – but which have been turned into commodities so as to line the pockets of a few.
A recent poll by Trends and Insights for Africa (TIFA) states that 86% of Kenyans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction as a result of their personal or family economic conditions. The same poll showed that 75% of Kenyans feel that their economic conditions have become worse under the current regime.
It is clear to most people that the proposed 2025 Finance Bill will not only make life unbearable for the majority of Kenyans, but also consign a bigger segment of the population into poverty. That is why Kenyans from different walks of life have over the course of recent weeks been bringing different aspects of the Finance Bill to public attention, and highlighting its adverse effects on our collective economic conditions. We have however seen that those who have attempted to bring to public knowledge the contents of the 2025 Finance Bill have been harassed and intimidated – or even arrested, as in the case of Ruth Njeri. This intimidation of active citizens is a pointer to an increasingly paranoid regime, one that sees shadows in the dark.
As we complete this first week of June 2025, Kenyans will have to choose between shared prosperity or shared poverty. Allowing the Finance Bill to sail through can only result in shared poverty for the majority. The only way to arrive at a position of shared prosperity at this moment in time is through sustained struggle against economic subjugation – a struggle that dismantles the colonial economic infrastructure and inaugurates a pro-people economic programme in its place.
Our generational responsibility is to continue our forward march into history, for nothing good has ever come to our society except through protracted struggle. It is the people who create history.
Sungu Oyoo is the Director of Special Projects and Organisational Development at Mwamko, the Pan-African popular pedagogy collective. He is also the national spokesperson of Kongamano la Mapinduzi, a social movement in Kenya.
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